The Lincoln
(NE) JournalStar newspaper has a lengthy article discussing
the problems the State of Nebraska is having administering lethal
injections to condemned prisoners. The difficulties are related
to the apparent shortages and/or quality of one of the three chemicals
used to put a prisoner to death, as well as to legal challenges
brought against the practice. The title of the article asks "Should
Nebraska tweak execution rules?" I have enough to say against
capital punishment without confining my objections to the space
of an article. What grabbed my attention was this title itself.

If the State
of Nebraska is seeking precedent for "tweaking" the
rules that prescribe how it is to go about lawfully killing people,
it need look no further than the content of what passes for "news"
in our world. With the continuing collapse of the pyramidal power
structure with which political systems exercise their defining
monopoly on the use of violence, governments have had to scramble
to reinforce their coercive authority. For a long time, the appetites
of the state – along with the corporate interests that direct
the political machinery to their ends – have been disguised behind
such liberalizing notions as "due process of law," individual
"inalienable rights," and more general allusions to
such principles as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Beginning
in early childhood, schools have inculcated young minds in the
alleged virtues of obedience to the centralized authority of the
state, without whose continuing supervision, we have been told,
would render our lives "nasty, brutish, and short."
Lest such teachings be lost in our adult pursuits, the institutional
order reinforces them through its varied systems: the entertainment
industry, political campaigns and elections, and those supposed
organs of information I call the "lockstep media." The
distrust of power that might otherwise exist in the minds of even
the most gullible, is offset – by the chorus of establishment
voices – with assurances that there are inherent limitations on
both the range and methods by which state systems act.

The Constitution,
we have been told, provides one such restraint upon the state.
But it takes little time to discover that words do not
carry with them the same meaning as what we use them to describe.
The words "reasonable," "general welfare,"
"common defense," "due process," "probable
cause," and the like, do not lend themselves to the demonstrable
precisions of thought that we find in mathematics. The proposition
"2 + 2 = 4" can be concretely demonstrated to any dullard
in a matter of minutes. The content of what legal "process"
is "due" an accused individual is another matter, inevitably
tied up in the biases, self-interests, fears, and other subjective
forces at work within the minds of those who are to decide such
matters. In any political system, of course, it is the state
itself that makes such determinations. Government officials
– be they presidents, senators, judges, or administrative commissioners
– will interpret the meaning of all the inherently vague
and abstract words under which they act.